My frame of reference is back in Invasion/Odyssey T2, the last time I played Standard competitively. It seems like current Standard decks are dominated more and more by Rares and Mythic Rare. For example, the 7th deck in this top deck listing (by Sneaky Homunkulus) is literally 100 percent rares except for basic lands:
And commons make only token placement in the other decks, as well. By comparison, I looked at a random dominant Psychatog deck from Invasion/Odyssey Standard, and it had 19 commons, 19 uncommons, and only 11 rares.
I wonder, has anyone done an actual statistical analysis on this trend over time? It looks like it might be due to WotC getting more and more cashgrabby with it's blatant "Rarity is an excuse to break balance" for selling packs.
However, recently, things that can be simple enough for common or uncommon, but usually saw tournament play, like removal, and direct damage, have been very subpar. Or they have been very good, and put in the rare slot.
There seems to be a move to rare for both removal and card draw that used to be at lower rarities.
The current standard lacks both Red aggro and blue control or tempo decks that often play more commons and uncommons that is making it suck even more.
There are still good uncommons duskwatch recruiter it is just that more of the glue cards keep ending up at rare with the sets mechanic stapled onto them.
Why is scatter to the winds rare for example? I mean people switched to void shatter if they wanted a cancel anyway once it was available so this case isn't quite relevent. Ruinous path? it says "and plainswalker" and hero's downfall was a rare, for limited reasons? Is it really all about limited? typically a lot of rarity concerns are due to limited
exquiste firecraft has to be rare because it has "can't be countered" on it.. is that too complicated?
these cards need to move back towards uncommon they aren't complicated they are just powerful.
one way they benefit from having staple cards at rare/mythic is that most of the chase cards being that high of a rarity will force more packs to be opened, thus they'll sell more packs
This is exactly correct, and it's one of the concerns that many players raised upon the creation of Mythic rarity. Wizards promised not to JUST use mythics as an excuse to print tournament staples, and while they may not violate the letter of that promise by printing a few *****ty mythics each set, they've most definitely violated the spirit of it with cards like Lotus Cobra and Voice of Resurgence.
They never said they weren't going to put tournament staples at mythic and they clearly don't just use mythics to print tournament staples. First, here's exactly what was said:
This now leads us to the next question: How are cards split between rare and mythic rare? Or more to the point, what kind of cards are going to become mythic rares? We want the flavor of mythic rare to be something that feels very special and unique. Generally speaking we expect that to mean cards like Planeswalkers, most legends, and epic-feeling creatures and spells. They will not just be a list of each set's most powerful tournament-level cards.
Note that it never says that mythics aren't going to be tournament-level cards. It says that mythics aren't only going to comprise the tournament-level cards in the set. I would argue that that's true.
I don't play standard, but we thankfully have a forum full of sample decks for me to look at. Using the list in the Bant company primer (which was chosen as the only standard deck I recognized the name of), there are 9 commons, 11 uncommons, 39 rares, 6 mythics, and 8 basic lands. Mythics are clearly not the bulk of powerful tournament-level cards, unless Bant company is exceedingly unusual for a standard deck. I skimmed through a couple other lists in the standard forums, and it looks like mythics occupy somewhere in the 12-15 range in those lists, so company might be a little low. They're still only occupying 20% of the slots in decklists, so there must be some playable cards at other rarities. I also skimmed through the 21 SOI mythics. Three of those transform, so there are 18 unique cards. Of those, I saw 4 (I think, it might be more. It's obviously not an in depth look at standard) in some quantity in the decks I skimmed through, either maindeck or sideboard. Even if there are twice as many as I counted seeing regular play, that's fewer than half. Most mythics are not competitive tournament level cards. WotC has done more or less what they said they were going to do with them. There have been a few mythics that felt like they were stuck there because of power level and not for flavor reasons, but it's really easy to overlook the numerous unplayable or borderline unplayable cards at mythic in every set since the introduction of the rarity. Look at the rest of the mythics around Lotus Cobra and Voice of Resurgence. They're mostly terrible from a competitive standpoint. If mythics were just an excuse to upshift rarity on tournament staples, a lot more of those mythics would be playable.
Standard may be weighted more towards rares than it used to be and you can come up with any number of reasons to dislike mythics, but I don't buy that WotC is throwing out a few terrible mythics as an excuse to jam the rarity full of tournament staples or that they've egregiously violated their initial statements about mythic rarity.
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The biggest problem remains printing staple effects at rare and printing so few playable cards at common. I'd argue that bumping mediocre removal to uncommon and good removal to rare, rather than help limited become more balanced, has actually made limited worse by making it more bomb reliant and prone to luck sacks. Yea, its given them the ability to make limited formats more unique by pushing strategies that would be too risky with good removal, but that just leads to formats like BFZ/OATH, AVR, Dash of Tarkir, and lol voltron Theros. Too often, rather than just building a solid deck, the formats want you to pursue risky, synergistic strategies that either work really, really well and are cheese to play against, or fail because the cards you needed just didn't show. That, or completely unbalanced formats where one color is way too weak.
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The Meaning of Life: "M-hmm. Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations"
Onering's 4 simple steps that let you solve any problem with Magic's gameplay
Whether its blue players countering your spells, red players burning you out, or combo, if you have a problem with an aspect of Magic's gameplay, you can fix it!
Step 1: Identify the problem. What aspect of Magic don't you like? Step 2: Find out how others deal with the problem. How do players deal with this aspect of the game when they run into it? Step 3: Do what those players do. Step 4: No more problem. Bonus: You are now better at Magic. Enjoy those extra wins!
I agree with others that printing staples at mythic and good removal at rare is a cynical milking of players. I'm basically out of standard, just still playing my DTK-Origins cards until they rotate.
I think a big reason you are seeing that now (and have for a while under the NWO) is the trend towards goodstuff decks of various speeds. Most of the winning decks are Green-x goodstuff just playing the most efficient creatures/walkers on a pound for pound basis. Synergy matters but is not the priority. In that kind of environment it is natural to see rares/mythics seeing such heavy play.
I think a big reason you are seeing that now (and have for a while under the NWO) is the trend towards goodstuff decks of various speeds. Most of the winning decks are Green-x goodstuff just playing the most efficient creatures/walkers on a pound for pound basis. Synergy matters but is not the priority. In that kind of environment it is natural to see rares/mythics seeing such heavy play.
Along these same lines, mana bases are way more expensive these days as well (because they're often better). Invasion had tapped dual lands with no upside in standard decks as fixing. When you have a three color deck with 12 rare lands (or a Modern mana base with 20+), you can see how the number of rares/mythics per deck would naturally go up.
Mono W Humans, for example, runs 19 rares, which isn't really that much.
But ultimately, does number of rares really matter? Duskwatch Recruiter is a $2.50 card in paper. 78% of the rares and mythics in the set are worth less than that.
Invasion-Odyssey standard was basically Upheaval versus Opposition - decks built around powerful rares, but mostly populated with strong commons and uncommons. Even random UBR and RUG goodstuff decks were mostly made up of uncommons, since WotC didn't feel as obligated to put a gold expansion symbol on every strong card they printed.
I don't believe WotC when they say that limited needs terrible cards to be fun. Just look across different cubes, and you probably aren't going to see as many Rite of the Serpents as Doom Blades in the cards people are choosing to include in their custom limited environments.
They literally design modern Magic to force the lottery system, you absolutely need four copies of those mighty Gideons, Jaces and Avacyns, and someone needs to open aprox. 110 boosters to get just one of those. They don't care if it's SCG or Johnny buying boosters at Wal Mart.
EMA did more for pauper than the last 3 years of non-core blocks combined.
We should consider that with the introduction of mythics and changes to expansion rarity setups and sizes, rares became more common than they were before. In addition, the amount of rare lands has increased greatly since zendikar, with the fetchlands, rare manlands, checklands, drownyard and kessig, shocklands, temples, etc. The manabase changed to be more rare than previously, by far, which changes the results a bit.
Isn't there still just 1 rare or mythic per booster pack?
The problem is that competitive decks use more mythic than ever. Even if their power is bigger they could not add synergy among mythic rares. This way they are making them weaker.
I do not think rares are just more complex than common, they also have better stats. The difference in power is there not only for balance issues in limited. They want this so people will open more packs.
Wizards does make more money off of people opening more product. They are a business after all, so they want people to open products.
Rares/mythics are supposed to me more complex and powerful, that's why they're harder to get in packs. This lets Wizards make strong cards without having to worry as much how they'll impact limited, as you'll see less of them in sealed polls and drafts
The problem is that competitive decks use more mythic than ever. Even if their power is bigger they could not add synergy among mythic rares. This way they are making them weaker.
I do not think rares are just more complex than common, they also have better stats. The difference in power is there not only for balance issues in limited. They want this so people will open more packs.
Wizards does make more money off of people opening more product. They are a business after all, so they want people to open products.
Rares/mythics are supposed to me more complex and powerful, that's why they're harder to get in packs. This lets Wizards make strong cards without having to worry as much how they'll impact limited, as you'll see less of them in sealed polls and drafts
Yeah if WOTC made strong cards I would not have opened two mythics in three packs and have the total value being much less than the actual pack.
I think a big reason you are seeing that now (and have for a while under the NWO) is the trend towards goodstuff decks of various speeds. Most of the winning decks are Green-x goodstuff just playing the most efficient creatures/walkers on a pound for pound basis. Synergy matters but is not the priority. In that kind of environment it is natural to see rares/mythics seeing such heavy play.
Exactly. And to take it a bit further, I think at least a couple of the reasons for the trend toward goodstuff decks are 1) since the new rotation paradigm the overall card pool in standard is smaller so you have fewer available cards to make any given synergy work, 2) they pre-sabotage potentially good synergies to avoid creating broken decks which results in many synergies being too weak to even pursue.
I think WOTC really screwed up when they shortened the rotation period. They could have easily moved toward the 2 set per block, 2 blocks per year model and still allowed 24 months worth of sets in standard. Our cards would have been standard legal for longer (which I would like but apparently their bottom line disagrees) which would somewhat alleviate price spikes and there would be more cards and mechanics in the card pool which would increase deck diversity and better support synergy decks. These are the reasons that if the barrier to entry (i.e., rare manabases) weren't so high, many more standard players would flee to modern.
I blame limited for most of this. They care too much about that format over everything else. Now their excuse for everything is "to balance limited". I wish we could go back to the Ravnica/Timespiral days. Those were the "golden" days.
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Standard
none
Modern UBG B/U/G control BBB MBC WUR Control WWW Prison RRR Goblins
Legacy BBB Pox UBG B/U/G Control UWU StoneBlade UW Miracle Control
first off yes, are decks have a lot more rares and mythics than they did Before the creation of Mythics, for 2 reasons . One it takes a lot of packs open to create the card pools needed, Yes it's all about the money. 2 They decided that Limited is more important than a fun standard, yes that to is all about money. When they sold us on the Idea of Mythic rares we were told they wouldn't be staple cards in some fancy lawyer double talk.
I blame limited for most of this. They care too much about that format over everything else. Now their excuse for everything is "to balance limited". I wish we could go back to the Ravnica/Timespiral days. Those were the "golden" days.
What's funny is that Ravnica limited was more fun than any modern limited format.
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That was pretty interesting. But dropping a warship on me is cheating. Take it back!
I blame limited for most of this. They care too much about that format over everything else. Now their excuse for everything is "to balance limited". I wish we could go back to the Ravnica/Timespiral days. Those were the "golden" days.
I agree, I had a lot fun playing in the Ravnica/Timespiral days. It was the only time that wizards got it all right for me. Tempest and Lorwyn were also fun.
An underrated problem with rarity in standard recently was that up until SOI, mana bases were super easy. in the past 5 years or so they went from checklands and shocklands to shocklands and fetchlands to fetchlands and battlelands to now battlelands and whatever you want to call the SOI lands. Particularly when the fetchlands were in standard, any deck could play literally any color. It's how Siege Rhino ended up in basically every deck for a while. When any deck can play basically any card, the strictly best cards will be the only ones that are played. More decks had access to Rhino, mantis rider all the Khans charms and commands, all of these cards that were supposed to have very restrictive mana costs could be played in decks that weren't necessarily Abzan or Jeskai. Not to mention basically every deck could play Jace with almost no downside so his price shot up like a rocket. Rares are almost always stronger than commons and uncommons as far as creatures are concerned, so of course with more decks having more access to more colors, only the best creatures will be played, so only the rare creatures got played. The charms and commands were special cases that also followed this mold.
TL;DR: Fetches made only the best cards playable, and those best cards happened to all be rares and mythics.
That problem is mitigated a bit now by the fetches rotating out, but the next big thing we need to see a return of is efficient removal returned to uncommon and common. I understand that making removal slower/more conditional allows for more archetypes in draft, but take it from someone who plays almost nothing but limited, that's not always a good thing and it's not worth it for how much it hurts constructed.
In oath-oath-battle, if you weren't drafting BW allies you were losing. The strategy simply had the best synergy and most powerful cards. This wouldn't have been as much of a problem as it was if the other archetypes had the removal they needed to combat it. Red needs a 2 mana bolt at common. Green needs an efficient fight card at common. Blue needs a 3 mana claustrophobia effect. None of them had enough of this stuff to combat BW, especially when those were the two colors that had unconditional removal at common.
I miss the days of doom blade at uncommon, murder at common, lightning strike at common, etc.
Yes, sometimes these cards had better versions available at higher rarity for standard, but at least they gave people the option to try with. Most of the commons and uncomms that see standard play are usually counters, burn spells, black and white removal, utility creatures. There are just far fewer of those now.
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http://magic.wizards.com/articles/archive/mtgo-standings/competitive-standard-constructed-league-2016-06-26
And commons make only token placement in the other decks, as well. By comparison, I looked at a random dominant Psychatog deck from Invasion/Odyssey Standard, and it had 19 commons, 19 uncommons, and only 11 rares.
I wonder, has anyone done an actual statistical analysis on this trend over time? It looks like it might be due to WotC getting more and more cashgrabby with it's blatant "Rarity is an excuse to break balance" for selling packs.
Corrupt Control B | Burn R | UG Turbofog UG | White Weenie W | GW Tethmos WG | BG Cycling Combo BG
Enchantress GBW | Colorless Tron C | Red Deck Wins R | UG Madness UG | Mono-G Tron G | UR Puzzlehorns UR
Rhystic Tron WU| WU Prowess WU | BR Reanimator BR | Mono-R Control R | Stompy G | Temur Tron URG
Mardu Infinite Priest WBR | 85-Card Dredge BRG | Elves GU | Boros Bully RW | Jeskai Familiars RWU
http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/new-world-order-2011-12-02
After Time Spiral began a long look at complexity in the common front. More of it is shifted up to uncommon and rares. So usually the best, most complicated cards end up at higher rarity.
The current standard lacks both Red aggro and blue control or tempo decks that often play more commons and uncommons that is making it suck even more.
There are still good uncommons duskwatch recruiter it is just that more of the glue cards keep ending up at rare with the sets mechanic stapled onto them.
Why is scatter to the winds rare for example? I mean people switched to void shatter if they wanted a cancel anyway once it was available so this case isn't quite relevent. Ruinous path? it says "and plainswalker" and hero's downfall was a rare, for limited reasons? Is it really all about limited? typically a lot of rarity concerns are due to limited
exquiste firecraft has to be rare because it has "can't be countered" on it.. is that too complicated?
these cards need to move back towards uncommon they aren't complicated they are just powerful.
Pioneer:UR Pheonix
Modern:U Mono U Tron
EDH
GB Glissa, the traitor: Army of Cans
UW Dragonlord Ojutai: Dragonlord NOjutai
UWGDerevi, Empyrial Tactician "you cannot fight the storm"
R Zirilan of the claw. The solution to every problem is dragons
UB Etrata, the Silencer Cloning assassination
Peasant cube: Cards I own
Basically, limited is balanced by making more powerful and more complex cards rarer.
"Sometimes, the situation is outracing a threat, sometimes it's ignoring it, and sometimes it involves sideboarding in 4x Hope//Pray." --Doug Linn
Note that it never says that mythics aren't going to be tournament-level cards. It says that mythics aren't only going to comprise the tournament-level cards in the set. I would argue that that's true.
I don't play standard, but we thankfully have a forum full of sample decks for me to look at. Using the list in the Bant company primer (which was chosen as the only standard deck I recognized the name of), there are 9 commons, 11 uncommons, 39 rares, 6 mythics, and 8 basic lands. Mythics are clearly not the bulk of powerful tournament-level cards, unless Bant company is exceedingly unusual for a standard deck. I skimmed through a couple other lists in the standard forums, and it looks like mythics occupy somewhere in the 12-15 range in those lists, so company might be a little low. They're still only occupying 20% of the slots in decklists, so there must be some playable cards at other rarities. I also skimmed through the 21 SOI mythics. Three of those transform, so there are 18 unique cards. Of those, I saw 4 (I think, it might be more. It's obviously not an in depth look at standard) in some quantity in the decks I skimmed through, either maindeck or sideboard. Even if there are twice as many as I counted seeing regular play, that's fewer than half. Most mythics are not competitive tournament level cards. WotC has done more or less what they said they were going to do with them. There have been a few mythics that felt like they were stuck there because of power level and not for flavor reasons, but it's really easy to overlook the numerous unplayable or borderline unplayable cards at mythic in every set since the introduction of the rarity. Look at the rest of the mythics around Lotus Cobra and Voice of Resurgence. They're mostly terrible from a competitive standpoint. If mythics were just an excuse to upshift rarity on tournament staples, a lot more of those mythics would be playable.
Standard may be weighted more towards rares than it used to be and you can come up with any number of reasons to dislike mythics, but I don't buy that WotC is throwing out a few terrible mythics as an excuse to jam the rarity full of tournament staples or that they've egregiously violated their initial statements about mythic rarity.
Onering's 4 simple steps that let you solve any problem with Magic's gameplay
Step 1: Identify the problem. What aspect of Magic don't you like? Step 2: Find out how others deal with the problem. How do players deal with this aspect of the game when they run into it? Step 3: Do what those players do. Step 4: No more problem. Bonus: You are now better at Magic. Enjoy those extra wins!
Along these same lines, mana bases are way more expensive these days as well (because they're often better). Invasion had tapped dual lands with no upside in standard decks as fixing. When you have a three color deck with 12 rare lands (or a Modern mana base with 20+), you can see how the number of rares/mythics per deck would naturally go up.
Mono W Humans, for example, runs 19 rares, which isn't really that much.
But ultimately, does number of rares really matter? Duskwatch Recruiter is a $2.50 card in paper. 78% of the rares and mythics in the set are worth less than that.
I don't believe WotC when they say that limited needs terrible cards to be fun. Just look across different cubes, and you probably aren't going to see as many Rite of the Serpents as Doom Blades in the cards people are choosing to include in their custom limited environments.
EMA did more for pauper than the last 3 years of non-core blocks combined.
Isn't there still just 1 rare or mythic per booster pack?
Corrupt Control B | Burn R | UG Turbofog UG | White Weenie W | GW Tethmos WG | BG Cycling Combo BG
Enchantress GBW | Colorless Tron C | Red Deck Wins R | UG Madness UG | Mono-G Tron G | UR Puzzlehorns UR
Rhystic Tron WU| WU Prowess WU | BR Reanimator BR | Mono-R Control R | Stompy G | Temur Tron URG
Mardu Infinite Priest WBR | 85-Card Dredge BRG | Elves GU | Boros Bully RW | Jeskai Familiars RWU
Wizards does make more money off of people opening more product. They are a business after all, so they want people to open products.
Rares/mythics are supposed to me more complex and powerful, that's why they're harder to get in packs. This lets Wizards make strong cards without having to worry as much how they'll impact limited, as you'll see less of them in sealed polls and drafts
Yeah if WOTC made strong cards I would not have opened two mythics in three packs and have the total value being much less than the actual pack.
Exactly. And to take it a bit further, I think at least a couple of the reasons for the trend toward goodstuff decks are 1) since the new rotation paradigm the overall card pool in standard is smaller so you have fewer available cards to make any given synergy work, 2) they pre-sabotage potentially good synergies to avoid creating broken decks which results in many synergies being too weak to even pursue.
I think WOTC really screwed up when they shortened the rotation period. They could have easily moved toward the 2 set per block, 2 blocks per year model and still allowed 24 months worth of sets in standard. Our cards would have been standard legal for longer (which I would like but apparently their bottom line disagrees) which would somewhat alleviate price spikes and there would be more cards and mechanics in the card pool which would increase deck diversity and better support synergy decks. These are the reasons that if the barrier to entry (i.e., rare manabases) weren't so high, many more standard players would flee to modern.
none
Modern
UBG B/U/G control
BBB MBC
WUR Control
WWW Prison
RRR Goblins
Legacy
BBB Pox
UBG B/U/G Control
UWU StoneBlade
UW Miracle Control
What's funny is that Ravnica limited was more fun than any modern limited format.
TL;DR: Fetches made only the best cards playable, and those best cards happened to all be rares and mythics.
That problem is mitigated a bit now by the fetches rotating out, but the next big thing we need to see a return of is efficient removal returned to uncommon and common. I understand that making removal slower/more conditional allows for more archetypes in draft, but take it from someone who plays almost nothing but limited, that's not always a good thing and it's not worth it for how much it hurts constructed.
In oath-oath-battle, if you weren't drafting BW allies you were losing. The strategy simply had the best synergy and most powerful cards. This wouldn't have been as much of a problem as it was if the other archetypes had the removal they needed to combat it. Red needs a 2 mana bolt at common. Green needs an efficient fight card at common. Blue needs a 3 mana claustrophobia effect. None of them had enough of this stuff to combat BW, especially when those were the two colors that had unconditional removal at common.
I miss the days of doom blade at uncommon, murder at common, lightning strike at common, etc.
Yes, sometimes these cards had better versions available at higher rarity for standard, but at least they gave people the option to try with. Most of the commons and uncomms that see standard play are usually counters, burn spells, black and white removal, utility creatures. There are just far fewer of those now.